Fashion and modernity

Part 1. Producing Identities - 1. James Morrison (1789-1857), 'Napoleon of Shopkeepers' - 2. Lee Miller and the Limits of Post-war British Modernity: Femininity, Fashion, the Problem of Biography - 3. People dress so badly nowadays: fashion and late modernity - Part 2. Performing Bodies - 4. Court Masques: Tableaux of Modernity in the Early 17th Century - 5. Ambiguous Role Models : Fashion, Modernity and the Victorian Actress - 6. Multiple, Movement, Model, Mode: The Mannequin Parade 1900-1929 - Part 3. Processes of Modernity - 7. The Fingerprint of the Second Skin - 8. Cuttings and Pastings - 9. Entropy (fashion) and emergence (fashioning).

If fashion is an expression of individuality, why do we all dress alike? Can modernity be described as the experience of 'feeling modern' and, if so, what part does fashion play? Answering these intriguing questions and many more, this pioneering book shows how the concepts of fashion and modernity are intimately linked. It argues that capitalism and identity construction as social processes both have symbiotic relationships with the fashion system. Technology, the body, nationality and gender are informed and shaped by modernity, and vice versa. Drawing on key modernist texts as well as fashion theory and practice, this book seeks broadly to cover the history of fashion and modernity, a topic that has been surprisingly overlooked. Tackling themes including court masques in seventeenth-century London, Paris couturiers and forensic laboratories in twentieth-century Washington, the authors show how fashion throughout history has been a cornerstone in the construction of a modern self.